Campaign 2010

Carroll: Don't let Al-Turki go free, Colorado

By Vincent CarrollDenver Post Columnist

Posted:
03/08/2013 08:59:24 AM MST

Updated:
04/29/2013 11:05:53 AM MDT

Sarah Khonaizan, left, and her husband Homaidan Al-Turki, both Saudi citizens, arrive at the Arapahoe County courthouse in Centennial in this May 12, 2006, file photo. (Ed Andrieski, Associated Press file)

If Homaidan Al-Turki — a sexual predator who kept a young Indonesian woman in servitude for 4½ years in Aurora — is transferred from the Colorado Department of Corrections to Saudi Arabia, he will almost certainly soon go free.

The Saudi government has never accepted Al-Turki's guilt. It gave him the money to post bail, complained about the 2006 trial, and pestered the State Department until it sent state Attorney General John Suthers abroad to smooth King Abdullah's ruffled feathers.

The Saudis' attorneys later filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court claiming Al-Turki was victim of an anti-Muslim trial and jury.

Al-Turki may not receive quite the hero's welcome rolled out for Pan Am terrorist Abdel Baset al-Meghahi when he returned to Libya from a Scottish prison in 2009, but as an alleged victim of bigoted U.S. justice, he is sure to be greeted with widespread sympathy.

Gov. John Hickenlooper and Corrections chief Tom Clements can avert this travesty. They can deny Al-Turki's petition to be transferred to Saudi Arabia under the terms of the Inter-American Convention on Serving Criminal Sentences Abroad. They can stand up for the principle of equality before the law.

Advertisement

"This would be a miscarriage of justice if it were to take place," says George Brauchler, district attorney for the 18th Judicial District that includes Arapahoe County. "It doesn't make sense that we're going to cut a guy loose to go back to a country that doesn't view this as a crime and doesn't view our evidence as good enough."

Brauchler wasn't DA when Al-Turki was convicted, but the chief deputy who prosecuted the case, Ann Tomsic, remembers the victim well.

"I'm primarily a homicide prosecutor," Tomsic told me. "Most of my crimes take place as fast as you can pull a trigger and as fast as someone can run. ... The thing that is overwhelmingly different about human trafficking is that this man had possession, ownership, of this young woman for years. And day after day, week after week, month after month, he continued his abuse ... keeping this woman against her will when she's asking to go home. And not paying her.

"Think of someone living in the United States during the period she was here and having no idea of current events. She was in the basement of the Al-Turki home when 9/11 happened. She'd never heard of it. ... That's how isolated she was."

The victim — a sexually and socially naïve 18-year-old when she arrived in Colorado with Al-Turki's family in 2000 — slept next to the water heater in the upper-middle-class home, where she was sexually assaulted again and again. "Her day would start literally before sunrise and she'd be up until midnight finishing the laundry after she got the kids to bed," Tomsic said. "She worked seven days a week. She didn't have weekends off or vacation." She received medical care once, for an abscessed tooth. And she was intimidated by repeated threats of what would happen if she bolted to local authorities.

By the time prosecutors interviewed her, "she was just a shutdown person," Tomsic says. "Federal authorities recognized pretty quickly that she was probably a human trafficking victim, so ... she was taken to a battered women's shelter. Even women in the shelter would talk about how she was afraid to go into a secure courtyard. She was so subservient after 4½ years of being a slave that she would do the other women's chores."

Al-Turki was convicted of 12 counts of unlawful sexual contact, criminal extortion, theft of services and false imprisonment, and was sentenced to 20 years to life for each of the sex charges alone. But then, with his high-priced legal team exploiting every angle, things started going his way.

Two years ago, a judge reduced Al-Turki's sentence to eight years to life, making him eligible for parole — in part because of a glowing letter of support by former prison chief Ari Zavaras, who claimed Al-Turki had "devoted himself to helping others." And although Al-Turki was denied parole that year, just two weeks later Saudi Arabia ratified the very treaty under which Al-Turki is now seeking a transfer.

Finally, just last month corrections officials confirmed that he has cleared initial administrative hurdles to be transferred, with the final decision pending.

The governor's spokesman tells me Hickenlooper is not involved in the Al-Turki decision, so it will be Clements' call — which, if it's a green light, will then require a Justice Department sign-off. Fortunately, the local U.S. attorney, John Walsh, has voiced opposition to the transfer, but that doesn't guarantee his boss in Washington will agree. And as Brauchler argues, it shouldn't get that far.

"He's refused to acknowledge responsibility. He's refused to participate in sex offender treatment," Brauchler tells me. "What his supporters will tell you is, well, he's got religious objections. So, we just throw in the towel and say he's good to go?"

Would any American sex offender in such complete denial be released like this?

"The victim does want him to acknowledge his wrongdoing to her," Tomsic says. "And she wants him to try to better himself through treatment ... . She is also cognizant that if he goes back to Saudi Arabia, he will have opportunities" with servants again.

That's putting it delicately. "Saudi Arabia is a destination country for men and women subjected to forced labor and, to a lesser extent, forced prostitution," according to the State Department's 2012 report on Trafficking in Persons. Moreover, "the government of Saudi Arabia does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so. ... Domestic workers — the population most vulnerable to forced labor — remained excluded from general labor law protections, and employers continued to regularly withhold workers' passports as a means of keeping them in forced labor."

Withhold a worker's passport? Why, that's what Al-Turki did with his victim.

Is it any wonder that he and the Saudi government were shocked at his conviction?

Too bad. If he won't seek treatment, then let him stay where is he is, quarantined far from the next unsuspecting maid who might fall into his grasp.